


Last To Know

by blue_sun



Series: Twice A Year [4]
Category: Twilight, Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: 100 Themes Challenge, F/M, Family Issues, Imprinting (Twilight), Mental Breakdown, POV First Person, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 17:20:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20213452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_sun/pseuds/blue_sun
Summary: Boy meets girl. Boy Imprints on girl. Boy leaves wife.Somehow Angela is always the last to know, even when the world is ending.





	Last To Know

**Author's Note:**

> Six shorts relating Angela's fragmented account of what happens after Jacob imprints on the hybrid when the pack and the Cullens meet unexpectedly in the woods.  
(Please be kind, I wrote these in 2013 in early 'Twice A Year' days)

**1\. HOME**

(Sixteen weeks)

This isn’t a home anymore. Glass shatters on the floor and splashes my bare feet with white. Standing in the kitchen, you lift your arms as if to shrug then let them drop helplessly. You don’t know what to tell me. Nobody does. ‘_It was never meant to happen_.’

But it did, and it has, and now no one can think of what to say or how to tell me. You stand lamely on my linoleum, dripping rainwater, and describe the way your universe shifted on its axis. My ears can’t seem to shut themselves the way I want them to. I can’t make myself deaf.

I clutch my stomach in private agony and lean on the back of a chair, trying not to listen, but knowing I need to know what you’re trying to tell me. The warmth of this house has evaporated like a match blown out. Nothing we had can ever be seen by its light again.

I look down at my fingers. The gold band on my left hand pinches. I have to sit down before I fall down—but I can’t tell if that’s the shock or the pregnancy. Sixteen weeks pregnant. And now this.

I am the last to know.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

**2\. VAMPIRE** _  
_

She’s a vampire, feeding off the lives of others, not caring what she breaks or steals. It’s all about her. Even you said that. The others said that. Sam tried to explain, and I think I understand, but I wish I didn’t. I wish I could hate you for more than just abandoning me like this.

But I can’t hate you for loving her, and I can’t hate you for wanting to be happy—for "wanting to breathe". Just for not being able to breathe with me.

She’s a vampire, drinking away everything good. Next to her I’m the flame of a match, single and small, flickering. Fading at the edge of your thoughts.

I have to get out.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

**3\. HURT**

(Twenty weeks)

There’s a chasm in my chest like a black hole has opened up. It swallows everything—light, sound. Even when I’m screaming so loud I can’t hear myself think

_(black morning on the cliffs, waves carrying away stone grain by grain)_

it’s dead silent down there. It’s an absence of sound. A void. It spills through me like milk across the floor, liquid and opaque. Tonight I screamed at you. I didn’t mean to, but what other choice do I have? It’s been a month since we had a talk more than one-sided. (My side.)

You left this argument a long time ago, but I’m still trying to bring you back to the battlefield so you can at least defeat me like a worthwhile opponent (not a phantom railing at your back). I had to make you comprehend, but you don’t hear a word when I speak. You only hear me when I’m screaming.

I can’t blame you for taking one look at me and stalking back out the door with your ears pinned back. But I want to. 

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

**4\. CHASING PAVEMENTS  
**

(Twenty-two weeks)

I watch cracks in the concrete drift by beneath my feet. Once again I find myself pounding wet pavement in windy streets because I couldn’t stand to be where you are. Couldn’t stand the strain. Another darkening intersection slips by like a dog in the night, unremarked and unwanted. I wouldn’t want to be here if I knew where ‘here’ was.

It doesn’t help to be going this alone. The twins are at college and I haven’t told them. I don’t need more white knights trying poorly to rescue me.

I pass a rickety motel hunched by the road: there’s one car in the lot and a light on in the last window to the left. It’s dingy but at least inside would be warm, dry. My jeans cling to my legs and my sneakers squelch. I don’t stop.

I needed to get out. _I_ needed to breathe, and looking at you makes me choke. I’m drowning in this silence. It creeps up on us a little more with every second you force yourself to be by my side instead of where you want to be (need to be). Every fibre of your body compels you to run to her, and you force yourself to stay by me, swallowing the bitterness like acid. (My mother would call that loyal. I call it stubborn. As in: ‘_you’re a stubborn ass, Jacob Black, why can’t you just give up and go?’_)

That hurts more: that I know it’s a lost cause. I can see it in your eyes every time we’re together. Your resentment. The latest attempt at seeking the love you held for me once and finding it withered.

The sight of you hurts my eyes, and makes my heart shrivel and ache. The silence sprang from there: a tiny hole in my heart filled to overflowing with these new events. _‘It was never supposed to happen.’_ But good intentions can’t drain away the darkness I can see us drowning in. It rises daily, scouring me to an aching frailty in breasts and back. It isn’t a secret that I’m pushing you even farther adrift with every time I pull away, or turn my head aside. The tide is carrying you away and I don’t have the will to bring you back.

I can’t look at you and you can’t stop looking at me, as if somewhere you’ll find the answers for how to fix this.

With everything you say, I find it hard to believe someone so passionate and aware can be so blind. You used to be sweet. Now when it’s me, a bitterness creeps in, a sour note in the memory of something elusive. I’m losing you. I just wanted to know what it would feel like for you when _you_ lose _me_. Too late, I’ll find it doesn’t matter to you. Or perhaps I’m wrong.

Perhaps you’ll be frantic when you discover I’m not there (tonight). Sam will be frantic. You’ll all spark like cigarette lighters. You might spread the oil slick of your wake over the woods and set the town ablaze. I’d like that. One last act of the Matchstick before extinction. It’s a warming thought but when it fades it leaves me colder than before. Fantasy evaporates and the rain comes down again.

I drove all the way to Seattle to escape you, just like you ran all the way to her to escape me. In my darker moments I wonder if she comforts you for the lingering umbilical threads that still attach you to me. You’re not ready to let go. She wants to help; I don’t. (Poor Jake, having to stand by his short-life wife, and _it’s okay, love, her flame burns low, soon only you and I will remain.)_

Those nights, I curl away from you and know you’re lying awake on the other side of the bed. Driving is still the only way I know of that you can’t track. I need more time. Maybe, if I’m lucky, all this rain will wash away your newborn terror of acknowledging we’re over and we’ll meet in neutral territory. I’d like a lucid moment to say goodbye.

We’re short on time already, but I still need more. I can’t… process this as fast as you want me to. I need the time to think. Time I’m not vomiting my guts out or falling down light-headed, or laughing and playing around with the boys while I pretend I’m not watching you sit on the sidelines from the corner of my eye. It’s peculiar to be consoled by Leah of all people. But she _is_ the best one to understand; she’s an old hand at this after all. Emily hasn’t spoken to me since it happened, kindly keeping her distance. Leah was doing flips at not flying solo in the pity party. I’m surprised the packs haven’t drawn away, but even if Sam’s beyond sympathy, I get the feeling _they_ aren’t happy with you.

It’s a frail happiness. Their disgust is only a layer: beneath it their blood is still yours, and it runs thicker inside them than what’s growing in me.

Puddles splash around my sneakers. Another grey slab slides by. Seattle is cold, and the wind is harsh, but the rain is only light and misty. I shove my hands harder into my pockets and keep my head bent. My chest is sore and my stomach is heavy, but I’m sure it’s only a passing thing.

I can cope. Acceptance will come with time. It’ll all be all right again.

One day I’ll wake up and find I’ve forgotten what it was like to be loved by you.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

**5\. DECORATION**

(Twenty-four weeks)

You walk in while I have my back turned. Eyes on the tree, I can’t for the life of me see where to put this ornament when there are so many other bright, shiny things already jostling for space. Leah left at four, Seth and Brady bounding after. Sam’s returned to acknowledging my existence, but even he left – excusing himself with a hand to my stomach and a kiss on the cheek – shortly after Leah and Seth. I can’t say I’m sorry: it’s warming to still have joy, energy, bouncing around this house, but it’s tiring. After a while holding a smile on my face makes my jaw ache. Seth and Brady exhaust me; the heavy warmth in my abdomen exhausts me more. I need to sit down, but I’m almost done with the tree. Then I can curl up and sleep. Sleep and sleep and sleep and maybe when I wake, another day will have gone by. It hardly feels like Christmas, but I can’t tell Leah that. She’s trying so hard to make up for you.

It’s a delicate creamy gold, this star. Eggshell-thin ceramic with gold leaf. In my stomach, the little one shifts, as if sensing my unease. She’s not uncomfortable (Sam says it’s a ‘she’; his conviction no doubt stems from believing Emily is carrying a ‘he’)—but my back aches and I have to brace my spine with one hand while I study the seven-foot monster sprouting in my living room. I barely hear the back door creak.

After the vigours of four sweaty werewolves wrestling a tree into the house, your entry is almost ghostly. And like a ghost, the sight of you makes the sweat run cold between my shoulder blades.

Except it’s not you. It’s _you_, plural. It’s the white feet printing delicate little mud-marks on my linoleum behind you. It’s the fragile Botticelli snub at the end of her nose, making her look unreal. She’s so beautiful she makes something in my chest clench, and I hate her.

The golden ribbon of the star slips a half-inch through my fingers. Around my feet boxes and bags lie open, spilling tinsel and beads and coloured lights dark and powerless. I can’t do this. Not now.

Nausea surges in my throat. How could you bring her here?

She peeks around your arm, a deer scenting hunters. It’s strange to be the feared one. What could I possibly have that makes this girl shrink away? _You’re_ the intimidating one.

Wide brown eyes—liquid. Tanin-stained water circling a stormdrain. Plaster-pale skin (if only she were so fragile, too). Red mouth, white teeth; I make her nervous, and she chews her lips to show it. Bloodsucking childwhore. (‘_In the streets of Forks, they called her Pretty Baby’._)

My chest doesn’t move—in _or_ out. I think I’ve forgotten how to breathe. Please, go, before I start to gasp like a dying fish. Black spots samba around my vision. I can’t focus. Please, _go._ Please, please, please—

Vertigo rocks my world and I want to squeeze my eyes shut. Instead I tense so I don’t fall down. I’ve been falling a lot lately. I’ve stopped waiting for someone to catch me. The way your hands twitch when you’re around sometimes makes me think you’d like to catch me—but you can’t have it both ways.

A crack forms in your stony face. Will you actually speak this time? Strain has carved deep lines around your eyes. Part of me aches; there was a time when if I saw that struggle in your eyes, I would come to you, soothe it away, curl into your warmth until the tension faded and you folded around me.

My hands burn in front of me. I haven’t moved them. Inside, the youngling kicks – hard – and I can’t stop a flinch.

“Ange…” There’s my flinch, mirrored back to me in your tone.

The child looks up at you with distressed curiosity. She barely looks sixteen—and she’s even younger biologically. She’s also standing slightly behind you. She’s afraid. Of me? Why?

“This is—”

Her? It? 'The Imprint’?

“—Nessie.”

Still seeing spots. You should leave, before I truly fall down. She’s beautiful. She’s… decorative. Pretty but pointless. In a way, like me.

“I… Angela—”

_Stop saying my name_.

“—and I just… well, I wanted to say sorry…”

I can see you choking on the words. They taste like bile to you; I know that Look: ‘I’m two seconds from puking getmeoutofhere’. I know _you_. This isn’t where you want to be: caught between us. If I could, I’d cry.

Please just go.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry—Ange, you have to believe me, _this isn’t how I wanted things to turn out_.”

You wanted to say you’re sorry—but?

My legs are shaking. Can’t fall down. Floor’s hard. No one to catch… us. Us. Me and her.

Stalling only works if the other person doesn’t know you well enough to stop listening when you start, and start listening when you stop. So talk. (Because I can’t.)

“I wanted to say I’m sorry, but… But some part of me isn’t, really—and saying it if I don’t mean it will only make this worse!” I can see it’s tearing you up to say this.

I’m not surprised. It’s tearing me up to hear it. At some point, my body disconnected from my mind. Miraculously, I’m still standing. How long will that last?

“I don’t want to make this worse, Ange. It’s killing me to see you like this!”

Barefoot, heavily pregnant, wearing one of Isaac’s old singlets over sweats, and collapsing under the weight of your guilt? Numb-tongued and dry-eyed because I’ve spent so many nights _not_ crying and when everything I tried screaming at you died in my mouth, I ran out of things to say?

Maybe it’s desolation staring out at you from my eyes. I haven’t got any fire left in me, and I could tell you the exact day the last flame went out: today. Thirty-eight seconds ago, when you walked into this house with a whore at your heels and helpless repentance in the tilt of your shoulders.

I can’t help you with this, Jake. You’re on your own.

Despair wrenches in your expression, but I can’t change this. You can’t change this. You said so; Sam said so. Leah tells me so in the most soothing tone she can find.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” _Anymore_.

You can’t stop your mouth from forming the extra word. I can’t drag my eyes away from it. The impasse dissolves with a bird-boned hand clasping your elbow. She’s grown braver. I’d be angry, but I’ve lost touch with my own mind. Black crowds my vision.

“I won’t be coming by any more.”

There’s a vampire’s grip around my throat, or I still haven’t remembered how to breathe. Either way. That’s the second last thing you’ll ever say to me.

You turn to leave. The play of muscles in your bare back is a boy’s as he leads the way out of a moonlit clearing. For a second, I’m seven years younger and a heartbeat lighter.

“Goodbye.”

She hesitates in the doorway, uneasy to follow you straight away—or maybe to present her back to an enemy. The awkward look she shoots me before flitting after you like she can’t wait to be gone is sodden with pity. And remorse.

I wait for the rumble of the engine moving away from the house. Nice of you to drive and keep her out of the wet. Rain drumming on the roof nearly drowns out the sound, and my bare arms suddenly register the drop in temperature.

My mother’s star shatters on the floorboards.

Finally I can cry. We’re done; I’m out.

I shatter on the floor too, then, my tortured legs collapsing under our weight and dumping us among the splinters. Blood speckles the polished wood. Clay fragments grind into my knees. Among the fragments – all flaking gold leaf and glimpses of gilded whorls – smooth gold glints against the wood.

I can’t take my ring off yet.

Kneeling in my shattered star, there is one more thing I have yet to grieve for.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

**6\. WITH OR WITHOUT YOU  
**

(Twenty-six weeks)

The clouds are omnipresent overhead. I crook my neck to watch birds flying between me and them, and calculate the time until the sky collapses. Maybe not for hours.

I imagine the patter of rain against bus windows. The sound, false or not, soothes my restless spirit. I’m too big and too tired to be pacing around. Leah is mastering the Caged Wolf Prowl, but on me it just looks frenetic. The fist around my heart squeezes; I couldn’t tell Seth, Leah or Brady goodbye. They might have made me stay.

The Portland Greyhound station is quiet out on the platform; only the braver travellers face the chill. The smarter stay indoors until they can duck straight into the bus. I am not smart. I need to cold to cool my brain; I need to think. Somehow I got myself here. Must be magic. That, or I’ve already blanked the memory of paying off the cab driver. That seems likely: my jacket still reeks of disinfectant and wasted lust. Underneath that is subtle spice and vanilla from the kitchen where it always hung to dry. It’s been too long since you held me for the fabric to hold any memory of you.

I never bothered putting away the Christmas tree. On my last afternoon in that house, I sat staring at it, willing myself to feel… something. Anger. Sorrow. Regret.

Anything more than desolation and heartache. Instead, I got up and went to pack. When – _if_; after that last talk, it has to be an ‘if’ – you visit, you’ll see it. More likely someone else will come looking for me. _They’ll_ find it. Then they’ll bolt for you when they realise the scent is cold. I left the house the same I remember it from childhood. Clean. Tidy. Empty.

It’s going to break your heart to see it that way. But she’ll be there. Two steps behind, like an echo. It’s all too easy to imagine your face when you walk the corridors. You’re touching pictures, pillows, searching vainly for a scent you’ll never have again. She’s two steps behind, fingers on your shoulder. _She’s gone Jake; we can be together. No more troubles._

Twenty minutes until my bus arrives.

It only took a few days after that evening to force my hand. I contacted a real estate agent; emptied the bank account; paid off bills… Making the arrangements. It felt like I was arranging my own funeral but I couldn’t stop.

If I hadn’t done _something_, I could have stayed in that house for a year and a day, and more, sinking into myself a little deeper as you ignored me a little more each day. The last time we spoke – actually _spoke_ – you tried to convince me that you still love me. I believe you. Even after you brought her into our house, escorted her right into my last bastion of defence, I believe you. I believe you _do_ still love me—but not like you love her. It’s the gap that’s driving me to the edge.

I don’t want the loss and bitterness and eventual hatred to destroy the echoes of us. I don’t. I couldn’t live with that venom leaching through my bones. It would poison everything I touched. And I don’t _want_ to go…

But I couldn’t stay. I think you wanted me to, but do you really think that’s fair? To either of us? Or – as much as it kills me to care – to her? But you’re not rational right now, so I’m exercising my executive rights. I won’t be there when you slink in, responding to the call of one of the others—Leah, or Seth; maybe Sam. You’ll race to the scene immediately, but it won’t send you into a blind panic like it might have two months ago. Or maybe it will. I don’t feel like I know you anymore. I couldn’t say.

I can’t live like that. I won’t. Seventeen minutes until the bus arrives.

I won’t let our—_my_ little one grow up in a house that is not a home with a man who is not a father. Leah understands this. She may explain it to you, if you ask her nicely. And she’s in the right mood.

She sensed something amiss that last day we spoke. I saw it in her eye: suspicion, sadness and loss. And a triumphant light, heavily shaded—something like vindication.

I could be the one who got away the way she never could. In her own way, she’s cheering me on louder than anyone else can scream in defiance. It helps.

The universe has flipped on itself, and Leah Clearwater is applauding a human fleeing a werewolf.

My ironic streak reasserts itself and I’m laughing as I cry. The plastic seats are uncomfortable but the bus will be here in ten minutes. My entire life – what I haven’t left behind – is packed into a small rolling case for me and a larger one for the baby. Inside me the darkness bubbles—but the tide is receding.

For the first time in weeks, my head has broken the surface, and I can _breathe_. A voice overhead garbles something electronically. I look up for God, knowing it’s only a speaker. But I can’t help the automatic joke.

Fifteen minutes until I’m driving away and this is barely a memory. Down the platform, a flash of green draws my eye. A young woman in a green paisley headscarf and tightly-belted military surplus coat is flirting with a man leaning on a guitar case. Her back to me, the curve of her hip is still plainer than the sea and stars in the way she stands. All of a sudden I am aware of a kind of casual sexuality all around me. I feel adrift in it. Perhaps this is where I went wrong. Too much—or too little.

_‘There’s nothing I can do, Ange… It just _happened_. I’m so sorry—‘_

It’s plainer than the girl’s lines: there was nothing we could have done. Fate. Destiny. The way the mountains crumble. Once again, tears threaten. I bite the inside of my lip.

I had been suffocating—more than that. Dying.

Now air is rushing into my lungs. The bounty of it drives me to madness. I want to scream, and wail, and dance. I want to curse your name, and hers, and thank the gods for giving me the precious thing inside me.

Eight minutes until the bus arrives. At the far end of the platform, the headscarved girl gives me a curious look, but turns away when I look her straight in the eye. Their colour matches her scarf.

My fingers brush cool metal in my pocket. Drawing I out, I study my wedding band as it glints dully in the daylight. I meant to leave it behind. In the chaos and turmoil of finally leaving, I forgot. Now here it sits, weighing too heavily in my palm for something of its size. It’s supposed to be sitting on the kitchen counter: my letter to you. Given the circumstances, though, it’ll be hard to miss the gist.

Maybe (at the back of my mind) I always intended to keep it.

It, and the little one, will be my anchors. What was and what will be. The idea brings a warmth only lightly tainted to my insides and chases away the gloom for a while.

I wouldn’t let my daughter grow up in that house, confused and spun around like a leaf in a stormdrain by that maelstrom we brewed up for ourselves. I owe it to her to give her a better life—_any _life. A safer home, a _real_ home, where real happiness is possible. I can’t lie to myself: I want some of that possibility for myself. But more than anything I want to be able to share it with my daughter. Our daughter.

And I can’t here. It’s impossible. You’ll hate me. I know that already. For taking her, even if nothing else sinks through.

They’re so clear in my head, the memories surrounding this little one (making her, the least of them).

One of them sighs with lost potential and forgone warmth. If we could have found our way back to that, we’d have survived. That afternoon, sitting on a driftwood log on the beach, we were so… not ‘happy’, but _content_: our toes amongst the stones, twisting and pushing them about while we talked. The sun hadn’t yet set and the grey sky was as bright as it ever would be. We joked about Quil, his Imprint, the way Embry had gone stupid over a girl from the Rez. You did an impersonation of Sam’s warning to him, and I had to bury my face in my sleeves to prevent killing myself with laughter. I told you off for that—making me laugh when I still felt ill from morning sickness. Of course, the patented Jake Black response to tellings-off is further misbehaviour. I could barely breathe for laughing. Cold fingers on my bare belly set me yelping. The replying smack on the nose made _you_ yelp.

Wash trickled over the shoreline. The sun sunk lower. As the light faded out of the day, we talked about names. And only once you exhausted your stupider ones did we get anywhere. I didn’t care that Gwenyth Paltrow named her kid ‘Apple Martini’, _we _weren’t going to. Nor ‘Palomino’, ‘Stars’ or ‘Sheri Moon’—and _shut up, Jake! There’s nothing wrong with ‘Milo’!_

_Except Sam says it’s going to be a girl._

_Because Sam has so much experience with pregnancies?_

_…It’s a wolf thing. Just go with it._

Sam was convinced it was a girl, and you were convinced Sam was right, so we tried girls’ names. After an argument about grandparents, historical figures and _Lord Of The Rings_, we agreed (temporarily) to name the baby, if female, Rocío.

Then, just to get you back for the tickling, I wouldn’t let it go. If male, we finally agreed, something biblical.

_Like Lykaon_.

You let out a cry of indignation. _Oh, sure, make fun of the werewolf! I’ll show _you _Lykaon_.

The rain started to pour down as I fled the beach. Mud churned up on the path as we ran. Twenty minutes later when we arrived, breathless and laughing, at your house, dirt-spattered bare feet to chins.

Some sense of ‘fair play’ no doubt had hampered you into letting me ‘escape’ every time you leapt for the tackle on the way back, but once inside I was prey to the predator, and the kitchen table was going to suffer.

When Sam arrived to summon you to the boundary line for pack business, he had to wait outside for a couple of minutes, shaking his head. I couldn’t resist: I stuck my tongue out at him, and he threatened to bite it off if he saw it again.

He would never have to worry about it again.

In front of me the bus pulls into the platform with a hiss.

The baby kicks and suddenly the green-eyed girl is kneeling beside me with an expression of restrained wonder on her face as she looks at my belly. She doesn’t touch, only offers assistance.

I take it. The bus rolls out of the station just as the clouds open up and the rain begins to come down.

I’m oddly all right with that. With or without you, I’ll find a way to make it through this. And if I do, you’ll be the last to know.


End file.
